WazirX Loses $230 Million in Multisig Wallet Breach

Summary

On July 18, 2024, WazirX, then one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, lost about $230 million (some estimates put it at about $235 million) from an Ethereum Gnosis Safe multisignature wallet held under a custody arrangement with Liminal Custody.

• The wallet used a 4-of-6 signature scheme: five keys held by WazirX on Ledger hardware wallets, one key held by Liminal, with a Liminal-side address whitelist.
• The attacker got the signers to approve a transaction that swapped the Safe’s logic contract for a hostile implementation the attacker had planted on-chain eight days earlier, so the change sidestepped both the multisig threshold and the whitelist and let the attacker drain more than 200 tokens from the wallet.
• Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic attributed the theft to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and in a January 2025 joint statement by the United States, Japan, and South Korea, the United States and South Korea attributed it to North Korea.

Attackers

• The theft was attributed to the Lazarus Group, a North Korea-linked threat actor. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said on-chain data indicated the attack was carried out by the Lazarus Group.
• The primary exploiter address 0x04b21735E93Fa3f8df70e2Da89e6922616891a88 received the drained assets, alongside two secondary addresses, 0x35febC10112302e0d69F35F42cCe85816f8745CA and 0x90ca792206eD7Ee9bc9da0d0dF981FC5619F91Fd; Etherscan flags all three as WazirX exploiter wallets.
• The attacker had staged the hostile Safe implementation on-chain about eight days ahead of the drain, a sign of advance planning aimed at this specific wallet.
• Stolen tokens were swapped to Ether and then routed through Tornado Cash, a mixer under U.S. sanctions at the time and delisted by OFAC in March 2025 after the Van Loon ruling; by September 2024 the attacker had moved more than 42,500 ETH (about $100 million) through it.
• In India, Delhi police arrested SK Masud Alam, whom they accuse of setting up a mule account under a false identity that was used to route the stolen funds.

Losses

• Approximately $230 million in crypto assets across more than 200 tokens was drained from the affected wallet. Reported holdings included 5.43 trillion SHIB, 15,298 ETH, 640 billion PEPE, 20.5 million MATIC, 135 million GALA, and 5.79 million USDT.
• The loss represented a large share of WazirX customer balances. WazirX later rolled every account back to the balance it held at 1:00 PM IST on July 18, 2024, cancelling all trades placed after the breach, and described the event as a “force majeure”.
• WazirX’s Singapore parent, Zettai Pte Ltd, went into a contested restructuring. After the court rejected an initial plan and a second creditor vote was held in August 2025, on October 13, 2025 the High Court of Singapore approved the scheme (about 95.7% creditor support by number). Under it, pre-hack users received about 85% of approved claim value in crypto in a first distribution, with the remaining roughly 15% issued as non-tradable Recovery Tokens whose worth depends on WazirX’s future profits and recoveries.

Timeline

• July 10, 2024: the attacker plants the malicious Safe implementation contract on-chain, roughly eight days before the theft.
• July 18, 2024: an execTransaction carrying four signatures - three from WazirX and one from Liminal - swaps the Safe’s singleton for the attacker’s implementation at 06:17 UTC; the attacker then empties the wallet across a series of transfers, the largest of which sweeps 5.43 trillion SHIB, for about $230 million in total. WazirX discovers the breach and halts all crypto and INR withdrawals.
• July 18, 2024: the attacker begins swapping the stolen tokens for Ether.
• July 21, 2024: WazirX pauses trading and calls the loss a “force majeure” event.
• August 14, 2024: WazirX ends its custody deal with Liminal and begins migrating funds to new wallets; a Mandiant forensic review finds no compromise on the three WazirX signing laptops, from which WazirX concludes the breach originated on the Liminal side, which Liminal disputes.
• September 2024: an independent Grant Thornton audit finds Liminal’s infrastructure was not the source of the breach; Liminal and WazirX continue to dispute responsibility.
• November 14, 2024: Delhi police arrest SK Masud Alam in connection with a mule account used to move the stolen funds.
• January 2025: a joint statement by the United States, Japan, and South Korea is published, in which the United States and South Korea attribute the WazirX theft to North Korea.
• June 4, 2025: the High Court of Singapore declines to sanction the first restructuring scheme - approved by about 93.1% of creditors in the April 2025 vote - over non-disclosure of the Panama entity Zensui Corp.
• July 2025: the court sets aside the June 4 order, clearing the way for a second creditor vote.
• October 13, 2025: the High Court of Singapore sanctions the restructuring scheme.
• October 24, 2025: WazirX resumes trading and withdrawals, migrating custody to BitGo.
• Late October to November 2025: within ten business days of the restart, WazirX makes its first distribution, returning about 85% of approved pre-hack claim value in crypto.
• January 9, 2026: WazirX completes issuance of the non-tradable Recovery Tokens covering the remaining roughly 15% of approved claims.

Security Failure Causes

• Signer deception through a manipulated custody interface: the multisig, the address whitelist, and the Ledger hardware wallets were all in place, but the attacker used a fake Liminal interface to collect the four required signatures. The three WazirX signers approved what the interface showed as three ordinary transfers (two in GALA, one in USDT); Liminal’s system rejected all three on a payload mismatch, but the attacker had already harvested the three signatures and replayed them into the malicious upgrade transaction that the Liminal key then co-signed; the attack also left a failed USDT transfer on-chain about seven minutes before the swap. What the signers authorized never matched what the interface displayed, a blind-signing failure also detailed in the QuillAudits post-incident analysis.
• Malicious implementation swap: the signed transaction pointed the Gnosis Safe at an attacker-controlled implementation that had been prepared on-chain eight days in advance. Once the logic contract was swapped, the multisig threshold and the whitelist no longer constrained withdrawals, and the attacker drained the wallet’s assets to addresses they controlled.
• Concentration of assets in a single externally managed wallet: a large share of customer funds sat in one custody wallet, so a single compromise of that wallet produced a near-$230 million loss.